When we are lost, or in pain, or struggling or confused, we are most prone to seeking out God’s love to be with us and intervene, but also most likely to be in a place of wondering if and how God is still with us if such a thing is happening. Some of the most well-known parables of Jesus that speak to being lost and found, also give examples of seemingly opposite responses - chasing after to find, and waiting patiently for return - and both are exemplary of love. That can remind us that just as there are all kinds of ways we can experience struggle, and all kinds of ways our different personalities experience comfort and restoration; there are all kinds of ways that God will show love to fit what is needed. Perhaps learning this breadth and depth rather than only looking for one type of love to support will help us recognize how God is moving in our lives when we need it most, even if it is different than what we might assume.

It is a rare person who does not get sucked into the tribalism and associated suspicion and assumptions that happens in a highly divided society - like ours is. Dolly Parton was an exceedingly rare example of such a person who garnered appreciation and respect from all kinds of people from all camps, and kept focus on priorities that helped others and anyone could be a part of whether she saw things exactly like you or not. This allegiance to living out values that are good for everyone over picking a particular side to try and win at the expense of others is a perhaps forgotten staple of faith as modeled by many in the Bible, though, especially prophets, and Jesus himself. That can bring broad respect, but also broad frustration if you also are willing to critique and exhort anyone, but is also something it is worth us considering how to live out more in our own faith lives.

It is not unusual for us to encounter circumstances and people in our lives that leave us with uncertainty about what being faithful with them looks like. This could come from something positive and admirable coming from an unexpected source, or something with all the “right” faith words and labels making us feel uncomfortable, or anywhere in between. How does scripture model discernment of such people and situations, and living our faith for our thriving and the thriving of anyone we encounter?

One of the most common images in human culture for reflecting on the connectedness of people in the vast scope of space and time is how we live together “under the same stars/moon/sun/sky.” The Bible has its own examples of encouraging us to meditate on this, as well as descriptions for how God connects us with people of faith through the Spirit across space and time. Perhaps most surprisingly, God encourages us that even as we recognize our smallness and God’s greatness as creator in the midst of the scope of the universe, that can actually ensure trust in the bigger scale of God’s care for and inclusion of us, rather than make us fear insignificance and then chase after false advantage and importance.

Church CAMP can be one of the most formative experiences in people’s lives as campers, counselors or staff, and definitely has been for many people at GC3. Stories of how folks continue to be shaped by this ministry that is an important legacy of our church can be a great way to remember what shaped us, be inspired by how God is still moving, and have a sense of connection with all kinds of people rooted in shared experience and movement of the Spirit.

There are all kinds of things swirling around us in our schedules and the world around us vying for attention. We know our faith is a great resource for navigating whatever we go through, but it can sometimes feel difficult to connect with God and tap into God’s values and gifts. Thankfully, there are spiritual practices and mindsets God guides us to that can help us towards more rootedness.

There are all kinds of ways that we can feel divided from other people in the world, our communities, or even in our own churches. Even language we might want to associate with straightforward values or practices of faith can feel loaded with ways they have been co-opted by cultural battle lines so that we feel pulled apart from people we otherwise share community with. This is a current reality most of us experience, but bemoan, but it is also something that is a universal part of the human condition and has been experienced in various permutations throughout history that we can also see examples of amongst God’s people throughout the Bible. We may be tempted to seek the Bible to be relevant to our experience today with small 1 to 1 analogies of Biblical circumstances to modern situations, and try to find ammunition to win factional battles. However, we find God, in all examples of human factionalism, calling people to broader perspective and deeper values that lay down preferences and privileges to take up humility, grace, love and mutual service above all - even and especially at the expense of our own personal advantage - so common thriving and salvation can come. Can we still find ways to heed those timeless calls for whatever we deal with now?

For many people, the psalms extolling God’s glory as seen in creation and the provision and sustaining of nature are some of the most worshipful texts in the Bible. It turns out that many of those psalms don’t just contain reactions to what we would find naturally beautiful and breathtaking, they are also exhortations to see value in even the parts of creation that we might initially recoil from, as the Creator would. When we extend this practice from our appreciation of the natural world to how we operate in personal encounters and relationships, we will find that we are also opening ourselves up to transformation and finding ourselves in the company of the one who loves and saves us even in our frailty and failings.

A fairly common metaphor for understanding how God cares for us and helps us grow in the Bible is that of a mother bird watching over her chicks. There may be even more to this metaphor than we realize if we really reflect on our identity as chicks - having an extended time offered to learn and grow that allows both more advanced full maturation and closer bonding between generations (a scientific term expressing this is neoteny). Are we mainly tempted to rushing ahead and trying to prove how amazing we are and so the Kingdom must need us more than we need the Kingdom, or can we receive the chance to always be learning and growing under God’s care, humbly acknowledging our limitations and vulnerabilities, as a gift that actually helps our shared contributions to the Kingdom that God calls us to and supports us in?

Hosting the World Cup brought the United States a unique opportunity for cultural encounter and exchange at a massive scale this summer. There was some concern about how things would turn out going into the event, but some people ended up enjoying the stories of discovery and support through regular people experiencing the wonder of regular things that can often get taken for granted even more than the soccer. We can be reminded that a celebration and reconciliation of the diversity of all the people of the world that God has created is also a key element of our ultimate experience of salvation, so how can we appreciate and cultivate more of these types of glimpses of God’s promise in our lives and relationships?

We can often feel a tension between an emphasis on memory that risks having us feel stuck in the past, and a push towards change and the future that can leave us feeling unmoored and uncertain. There are powerful Biblical examples where the legacy of God’s faithfulness can actually provide rich soil, and our memories can be like seeds - planted so that new things can grow with roots of familiar values and interconnected support guided by God’s overarching mission for the redemption and reconciliation of the world. How can we learn to operate this way for our specifically called role within this eternal vision?

God as our loving and exemplary Father has given us an amazing creation to experience, explore, and find God’s presence in, while also creating settings and circumstances where we can learn, grow, and even be stretched so that we might be formed more and more as children after God’s values.

The many models and metaphors of the atonement and how we are saved by Jesus that are described in the Bible in part remind us that we are not just saved individually, but that we are saved into the family of God as part of the redemption and restoration of all creation that God is pursuing. Paul in particular describes us as family that are co-heirs with Christ - with contrasts strongly in character with how heirs often seek advantage over or even to eliminate each other, especially in his cultural context of the Roman Empire at the time. What an amazing gift, and one that we can figure out how to share with all of creation just as Jesus has shared with us. How can this profound salvation be lived out?

We may often think of redemption as mainly having a general spiritual second chance sort of meaning now, but the breadth and depth of language about the atonement we see in the Bible to help us understand the power of the atonement reminds us that it has financial roots for how people can be trapped and exploited in desperation, but God seeks to move for freedom and empowerment and is willing to deal with our failure or harm we experience to do so. With such generosity, what response might we have in our salvation to participate in God’s Kingdom with what was been shared and restored?

There are some models and metaphors of the atonement that are not as easy for our modern brains to connect to because of distance from the culture they were written in and how society has evolved throughout church history. A conception of God’s salvation working like a feudal Lord restoring their control and honor can feel disconnected from what comes to mind for faith now. We might get profound inspiration, though, from the reminder that God uses honor and glory in love, restoration, lifting up and including people in the work of the Kingdom by seeing dignity in the lowly and transforming our hearts and capacity to live for the thriving of all God’s people and creation.

For the disciples, Pentecost starts with still a lot of hesitancy as followers of a savior who was executed by the Empire that did not want to hear that Jesus didn’t stay dead. That feeling would make a lot of sense, but the Spirit moved to initiate a new kind of victory that couldn’t be stopped or overcome by earthly measures of power and success. Participating in this different kind of victory, as demonstrated by the countercultural way the early church started living by “dividing up the spoils” of the Spirit’s movement, is part of the legacy of salvation and atonement we are invited to, also - one initiated by our Christus Victor.

In our understanding of salvation and the atonement, the forgiveness of sins and invitation to new life for individuals understandably gets a significant focus, but the Bible also praises Jesus for achieving a redemption and recreation of all of humanity and the establishment of a whole new character of life we can participate in when this new humanity is shared with us. We may find it is different than we expect, or we may doubt that we really might be able to take up a cross and follow Jesus in this way, but the hope of scripture calls us to believe we all can have in common not just with Adam, but with Immanuel, Jesus, as well.

As we consider all the different ways the Bible describes the breadth and depth of how the atonement extends God’s gracious gift of salvation life, it can happen that our focus fixates on mechanisms for how sin is solved, or on the tasks of Kingdom ministry we are invited and enabled to participate in. These are certainly important, but even more foundational is the salvation is our reconciliation with God who created us, loves us deeply and moves to restore the connection we can be prone to pushing away from. Recognizing and responding to the ways God reaches out and draws us in, and prioritizing that connection in our life is important for not just knowing about, or agreeing with, salvation, but actually experiencing it.

In the modern West, we tend to have heard the most about a model for the atonement called “penal substitution” that focuses on Jesus receiving punishment for our violations instead of us. This is part of how the Bible speaks about our salvation and reconciliation, but for something as profound and transcendent as salvation, it shouldn’t surprise us that there are lots of models and metaphors used. Another foundational model is that of the “scapegoat,” and when we see how all these ways we grasp at understanding interact with each other, we may even find understandings of salvation that expand our experience and commitment to live out our faith as much as possible.

As someone who grew up in the church, whose grandparents were founding members, and who went on to carry the church’s values into his own life of ministry, Bill gives us funny and touching stories of what we’ve shared, as well as good grounding in what matters most in holding us together and giving us vision and purpose as a particular community of God’s Kingdom. May we be full of celebration for what has been, thankfulness for what is, and hope for all that is still to come.